Sparks of Light

Last Saturday we were at Camp Friedenswald, for Open Table Mennonite Fellowship's first retreat. I was able to get out to the fen in the early afternoon and enjoy its winter garb. By evening the snow had started and it continued to fall through the night. Back in Elkhart county, many churches canceled their services. Ours went ahead as planned, with a beautiful view of snow falling in the peaceful woods, seen through the windows of the Nature Center (a memory picture rather than a photo, since I was leading worship).

By the time we got home mid-afternoon, there was at least a foot of snow in the drive, and we had to shovel before we could pull into the garage. By Monday the sun was shining brightly over thick caps of snow on trees, bushes, and lamp posts. In other spots, the wind created contours. And yesterday I looked out at our backyard hemlocks, and found them full of glinting icicles, like a Christmas tree covered with tinsel -- but much colder! While some hung as straight as the icicles dangling from the neighbor's eaves, others had more intriguing shapes.

Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot"Midwinter spring" seems like an appropriate label for these days, even though Eliot was writing about a warm midwinter in England, and ours is a spring that keeps slipping back to midwinter.Several batches of balloons blew into our back yard one day when the sun was out and the snow had mostly melted and the calendar declared spring had arrived. So I tied them on the birdfeeder in celebration of spring. The photo above was what they looked like the next day, March 21.Below there is a slideshow of the corner of our front flower bed where the snowdrop bulbs are planted. I took these about every two days between March 3 and 18, eagerly watching for the snowdrops as the snow came and went. And came and went. And came and went. Even with the sempiternal snow, the snowdrops lived up to their name! (If you receive this as an email, you may need to go to the actual website to see the slideshow. The cycle ends with a photo of snowdrops with white blooms).

The view this morning, with the most recent dusting of snow. We haven't made it to "sodden by sundown" yet, though warmer temperatures are on their way.

For the past few weeks I have been busy with the final stages of helping edit a collection of essays on Assembly Mennonite's history, too busy to get to my blog. With a warmer week, our snow is melting fast, so it is time to post these before they are completely out of date. Snow and shadows and such.

Check out the avian snow angel on the lower right in the photo above. A telephoto lens would have been handy, but I did what I could before the shadow covered it entirely.And below, the date on the paper is January 25. I found it this past Saturday, March 15, on the front lawn, after the massive pile up of snow it had been in for the past several weeks melted -- still in its plastic bag and quite readable. I thought it was an appropriate headline. We broke the previous record of 100 inches of snow back before the most recent six inch snow dump.

Earlier this week, a rare snow serpent raised its hoary head in our front yard. Or perhaps it's a snowy version of a summer thundercloud, lit from behind.We still have plenty of snow on the ground, though next week's predicted warmer temperatures should keep it melting. Somewhere under the voluptuous snow below, there are snowdrop bulbs.I got curious about how things looked a year ago. The last four photos are from the front yard on February 17, 2013. There was a dusting of snow in the morning, but it melted by midday, and I found an eager-beaver dandelion in the grass, crocus shoots in the flowerbed and snowdrops beginning to bloom. A slightly different picture than we have this year -- those snowdrops are somewhere under the two feet of snow in the middle of the photo below. It's hard to imagine, but one day soon we'll be seeing them again. (This is called faith. Expectant faith -- a good thing to have any time of year.)

I'm looking out my windows on this sunny winter day and enjoying the light and patterns. The garage windows are colder, and Jack Frost has been busy. Inside, I'm looking through the angles and patterns of a couple different glass cruets.